Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today’s stories:
Poet Dolores Kendrick died last week at the age of ninety. Kendrick taught at Phillips Exeter Academy and for nearly two decades was the poet laureate of Washington D.C., where she “advocated for an expansive role of poetry in public life.” (Washington Post)
The New York Times reports that Radhika Jones, the editorial director of its books department and a former editor at Time, is expected to be named the next editor of Vanity Fair. Jones would replace longtime editor Graydon Carter and become the magazine’s first female editor since Tina Brown.
Speaking of Brown, the New Yorker considers Brown’s tenure at Vanity Fair, and how she remixed and revamped the publication.
Louise Erdrich talks about choosing when to be a mother, supporting younger writers, and writing her latest novel, Future Home of the Living God. (Los Angeles Times)
Erdrich’s book was included in the November/December installation of the Poets & Writers Page One column, along with eleven other new and noteworthy titles.
“I think our responsibility is to think critically, and to listen to each other.” Essayist and poet Kevin Young talks with NPR about living in a “post-truth” era and his new book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News.
HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Simon & Schuster reported increases in sales and earning for the third quarter of 2017, with particularly strong sales for J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (HarperCollins), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), and Hillary Clinton’s What Happened (Simon & Schuster).
At Vulture, Christian Lorentzen considers how the fiction of Susan Sontag stacks up against her nonfiction; Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish Debriefing, Sontag’s collected short stories, tomorrow.
